bakerstreet | Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Gothic Romance

Lightning streaks across the inky blackness. Somewhere far off in the deep woods, a single wolf howls. Go ahead, bring your meager candle close, no matter the danger that the flame presents to your luxurious satin clothing - you won't find any warmth to relieve you in this mansion built just as much of regret as it is of stone. But you have no other choice since you've been imprisoned here.

Or perhaps you're the one who's keeping a less-than-willing soul here to ease your own pain. Either way, you've found yourself the subject of an atmospheric, suspenseful gothic romance!

a type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th cent. in England. Gothic romances were mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was the forerunner of the type, which included the works of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles R. Maturin, and the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey satirizes Gothic romances. The influence of the genre can be found in some works of Coleridge, Le Fanu, Poe, and the Brontës. During the 1960s so-called Gothic novels became enormously popular in England and the United States. Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts. Popular practitioners of this genre are Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Catherine Cookson, and Dorothy Eden.
( source )

HOW TO PLAY
1. Comment with your character, info, and preferred role/trope or even setting. Is your character a bright-eyed ingenue? A tortured soul with as many skeletons in their closet as their are rooms in the castle? Hired help who has fallen for the mansion's newest guest and wants to save them from a certain doomed fate? How about a vampire, werewolf, or ghost? The only limit is your imagination!
2. Reply to others. Hash things out or go with the flow. Just get your gothic, creepy shipping on.
3. RNG the prompts if you need to. Otherwise, have fun. Treat this as seriously or as irreverent as you'd like.

PROMPTS
( change the gender/pronouns out for appropriate ones! | source )

1. Powerful love. Heart-stirring, often sudden, emotions create a life or death commitment. Many times this love is the first the character has felt with this overwhelming power.

2. Uncertainty of reciprocation. What is the beloved thinking? Is the lover's love returned or not?

3. Unreturned love. Someone loves in vain (at least temporarily). Later, the love may be returned.

4. Tension between true love and father's control, disapproval, or choice. Most often, the father of the woman disapproves of the man she loves.

5. Lovers parted. Some obstacle arises and separates the lovers, geographically or in some other way. One of the lovers is banished, arrested, forced to flee, locked in a dungeon, or sometimes, disappears without explanation. Or, an explanation may be given (by the person opposing the lovers' being together) that later turns out to be false.

6. Illicit love or lust threatens the virtuous one. The young woman becomes a target of some evil man's desires and schemes.

7. Rival lovers or multiple suitors. One of the lovers (or even both) can have more than one person vying for affection.

8. Dark (and brooding?) At least one member of the pair has a tragic past or experiences that have left them closed off to the world.

9. Less than ideal beginnings. It's an age-old story: falling in love with the person who locked you in the dungeon. Or the attic, if they're a bit more hospitable.

10. Supernatural elements. Strange dreams about a shadowy place or a mysterious face. Blurry figures that linger just out of the line of sight. And the master of the house, always indisposed around the time of the full moon.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[The affably evil, slightly brooding master of the creepy old house with a hidden laboratory, so typical gothic setting with elements of Bluebeard and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.]

[ supernatural broody type. old mansion or estate negotiable. ]

Edited 2021-08-16 23:08 (UTC)

( ota gen. m/f for ships, f/f with previous cr. very here for aus, etc; )

[ It was supposed to be a covert operation.

Sneak in to the creepy manor on the hill. Get what she came for. Sneak out. Lysithea hadn’t exactly done something like this before, but the theory was simple enough - and, anyway, if she ran into any guards, she could just blast them with magic, right?

She’d gotten inside easily enough - she’d claimed to be deathly sick, a new patient for the master of the house, and they’d carried her through to a waiting room without questioning her. Then it was a matter of finding a place to hide until it was night and the house was quiet. Then she was here, wandering amid the shadowed blue-black halls with only a candle to light her way. Practically jumping at her own shadow - she really, really hoped the rumours of ghosts haunting the manor were false.

But maybe ghosts would be better than the living catching her here. There was little that was known about the mysterious master of the house, but they said he was known only as The Doctor. He took in the injured, the sick, and he was known for performing miracles - but it was also said that no one ever came back from this house quite the same.

Lysithea knew that well enough. And she wasn’t leaving until she found out why.

It was that she was thinking about when she heard a clatter behind her in the hall.

She swung around and held up her candle, heart hammering in her chest. ] Who - [ she cleared her throat and remembered to keep her voice at a whisper. ] Who’s there?

[ It couldn’t be a ghost. That was impossible, wasn’t it? If it was someone else who lived at the manor, perhaps a servant, she’d have to blast them before they raised the alarm - or perhaps, just her luck, she’d broken into the manor on the same night as someone else?]